Space
Category archives for Space
Rocket Science: Still Hard
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 3, 2008 Bad news from the worthwhile sections of this morning’s New York Times: another SpaceX rocket blew up. A privately funded rocket was lost on its way to space Saturday night, bringing a third failure in a row to an Internet multimillionaire’s effort to create a market for low-cost space-delivery. The accident occurred a little more…
Blue Sky On Mars
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 1, 2008 Well, OK, that’s a stretch, but there is water, according to the latest Phoenix results: “We’ve now finally touched it and tasted it,” William V. Boynton, a professor at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona and the lead scientist for the instrument that detected the water, said at a news conference…
Missed It by That Much
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 26, 2008 So, the Martians go and helpfully draw a box on the ground as a target for the Phoenix landing, and what do they do? They land next to it, not in it. Way to go, NASA. I bet if they hadn’t screwed up the unit conversions, they would’ve hit it…
The Ingenuity of Rocket Scientists
Posted by Chad Orzel on December 12, 2007 There’s another Mars article in the Times this morning, which I wouldn’t bother to note in a full post save for one thing: the way they got the results. The right front wheel of Spirit stopped turning in March 2006. Since then, the rover has been driving backwards, dragging the lame wheel along. This May,…
Don’t Wear Red or Mention Montana
Posted by Chad Orzel on October 23, 2007 The Science Times this week appears to be the Special Coturnix Issue, at least judging from the titles in my RSS reader– a huge stack of articles about sleep and biological clocks. Bora must be thrilled. Mixed in there, though, are two articles about NASA. One bears the dramatic headline “NASA Faces House Hearings on…
